Hybrid System for Powering Moroccan Healthcare Centers in Remote Rural Areas

• Published in: Journal of electrical engineering & technology 2021, 16(2), , pp.809-820
• Main Authors: Nourdine, Brahim, Saad, Abdallah
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Electrical Engineering; Electrical Machines and Networks; Electronics and Microelectronics; Engineering; Instrumentation; Original Article; Power Electronics; 전기공학
• ISSN: 1975-0102; 2093-7423
• DOI: 10.1007/s42835-020-00643-y

Rural healthcare centers offer essential preventive and curative care to rural communities. The most of these centers are located in landlocked and difficult to access areas all year long or at least during bad weather conditions periods (snowfall for example). Some of these centers include sensitive services that operate 24 h a day such as maternity facilities, which take care of women and their newborns and which require a healthcare supervised environment before and after childbirth. This paper highlights the importance of using hybrid power sources based on renewable energy for reliable, secure and economically profitable technologies. Solar photovoltaic (PV) sources become more technologically mature and more cost competitive; therefore the cost of deploying and operating solar PV farms is declining, reducing the cost of energy produced and finally the applied electricity tariffs for kWh. The combination of PV technology with other technology e.g. diesel generator could be an interesting alternative to ensure a permanently power supply 24 h a day and whatever the weather conditions can be. In this paper, the technical applicability of this concept and its potential advantages with comparison to other technologies according to efficiency, cost and environmental impact are investigated.